History of the Arabic alphabet: Encyclopedia II - History of the Arabic alphabet - Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions

History of the Arabic alphabet - Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions

A fair number of Arabian inscriptions survive from the pre-Islamic era, but, very few are in the Arabic alphabet. Some are in the Arabic language, or its closest relatives including:-

• The Thamudic, Lihyanic, and Safaitic inscriptions in the north.
• The Epigraphic South Arabian (Sabaean, Himyaritic, etc.) inscriptions in the south.
  • Both of these are in variants of the South Arabian musnad alphabet.
• Nabataean inscriptions in Aramaic and Arabic.
• Inscriptions in other languages, such as Syriac.
• Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet: these are very few; only 5 are known for certain. These mostly do not use dots, making them sometimes difficult to interpret, as many letters are the same shape as other letters.

Here are listed the inscriptions in the Arabic alphabet, and the inscriptions in the Nabataean alphabet that show the beginnings of Arabic-like features.

Cursive Nabataean writing changed into Arabic writing, likeliest between the dates of the an-Namāra inscription and the Jabal Ramm inscription. Most writing would have been on perishable materials, such as papyrus. As it was cursive, it was liable to change. The epigraphic record is extremely sparse, with only five certainly pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions surviving, though some others may be pre-Islamic.

See http://www.islamic-awareness.org/History/Islam/Inscriptions/ for copies of these inscriptions (note: Islamic point of view on that web site.)
See http://home.student.uva.nl/rogier.visser/ac/nabatean.html for pictures (without transcriptions or translations) of the inscriptions marked # in the table.

The Nabataean alphabet was designed to write 22 phonemes, but Arabic has 28 phonemes; thus, when used to write the Arabic language, 6 of its letters must each represent two phonemes:
d also represented ð,
H also represented kh %,
T also represented Z,
ayin also represented gh %,
S also represented D,
t also represented þ.
: In the cases marked %, the choice was influenced by etymology, as Common Semitic kh and gh became Hebrew H and ayin respectively.

As cursive Nabataean writing evolved into Arabic writing, the writing became largely joined-up. Some the letters became the same shape as other letters, producing more ambiguities, as in the table at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Arabe_arch.png .
There the Arabic letters are listed in the traditional Levantine order but are written in their current forms, for simplicity. The letters which are the same shape have coloured backgrounds. The second value of the letters that represent more than one phoneme is after a comma. In these tables, ğ is j as in English "June".
In the Arabic language, the g sound seems to have changed into j in fairly late pre-Islamic times, and seems not to have happened in those tribes who invaded Egypt and settled there.

When a letter was at the end of a word, it often developed an end loop, and as a result many Arabic letters have two or more shapes.
b and n and t became the same.
y became the same as b and n and t except at the ends of words.
j and H became the same.
z and r became the same.
s and sh became the same.

After all this, there were only 17 letters which are different in shape. One letter-shape represented 5 phonemes (b t th n and sometimes y), one represented 3 phonemes (j H kh), and 4 each represented 2 phonemes. Compare the Hebrew alphabet, as in the table at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hebreu_hist_arabe.png .

(An analogy can be the Roman alphabet uppercase letters I and J: in the German Fraktur font they look the same but are officially different letters.)

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Pre-Islamic Arabic inscriptions", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki